Musicians & Social Networking: Why You Need To Be Everywhere
April 9, 2008 by Eric Hebert in MarketingComment
A big thanks to Greg Rollett from Rollett Music Marketing for contributing this awesome guest post!
I gave a talk this weekend at BarCampOrlando about Music, Media and Money.
I was in front of a crowd full of Social Media enthusiasts, Developers and lastly a handful of actual musicians, podcasters and audio book producers.
I ran through the hot topics of the present:
- Trent Reznor vs. Radiohead
- DRM vs. DRM free
- iTunes vs. Amazon vs. Myspace Music
- Facebook pages
- Blogging
- And a slew of others
Ok, so we’re not all Trent Reznor and computer nerds, that’s obvious. What you are is a band, a musician, a podcaster, etc who makes some form of entertainment and wants people to listen to it. All the tools and topics above are ways for people to listen to your music.
Social Media attracts more listeners, drives fans to buy your merchandise and keeps them coming back by offering fresh content from songs, pictures, blogs, videos, etc.
In today’s environment, you need to be everywhere. There is no excuse for not having your band and your songs on every Social Network there is. The reason, your fans, current and future, are on every site there is. If they look for you on Facebook and you are not there, you just lost a fan.
I took a random poll of the audience in the front row. Where do you buy your music? The responses:
- iTunes
- Amazon
- I steal it form BitTorrent
- FYE
- Park Ave CD’s (local CD shop)
- Pandora (only streams at work)
- Rhapsody
Now imagine that you rocked your ass off last night. You met some amazing fans who were ecstatic about your band. They go home and log into Amazon and you’re not there, you lost a sale. Do you see the impact of being everywhere? It’s simple.
As the Social sphere becomes more open with API’s and OpenID, PlaxoPulse, OpenSocial and other Internet changing sites it will become easier than ever to update your profiles from one site. Currently with a Twitter update you can change your Facebook status, Pownce status, get updates sent from your blog, from video tools such as Blip.tv and create mash-ups to see where all of your Twitter friends are Twitting from.
As some of the music sites get around to opening up (remember that some music sites like PureVolume and Soundclick have been around for years, way before OpenSocial was even a thought in the tech scene), there will be a one-stop process for uploading photos, changing profile pics, updating shows and even uploading your music.
Be everywhere. Just like the old adage of, “Play your heart out every night, you never know who’s in attendance,” with the online world that applies 10-fold!
Madalyn on Wed, 16th Apr 2008 7:32 am
I just got back from the ASCAP Expo in L.A. and on the Branding & Marketing panel they talked about the same thing, “be everywhere”. I totally agree because it's smart to cast a wide net and real them in on the one-on-one communication.
And FYI, this blog post inspired me to write about social networking. You can check it out at http://www.indiemusicconsulting.com/coach/blog/.... I even quoted Greg from this article.
Rock on,
Madalyn Sklar
Founder, GoGirlsMusic.com & IndieMusicCoach
» Musicians Take Advantage Of Social Media on Sun, 18th May 2008 5:26 am
[...] marketing professional, Greg Rollett says Social Media attracts more listeners, drives fans to buy your merchandise and keeps them [...]
Margot Malia Lynch on Tue, 3rd Jun 2008 3:55 pm
good advice. Yet another thing to integrate into the time management. I need a manager for my time management. ha ha. Thank you. Some of those sites I don't know about..